Page 71 of Thunder

"No." It comes out of me low and hard.

Both of them turn, because I haven't said more than five words this whole time and now I'm stepping up out of the spot I've been rooted in. "That's not how this goes."

Moving up beside her, close, my shoulder to hers, I look my president dead in the eye for the first time since he caught us.

"She's not payin’ the price for this, Prez. Not one ounce of it. You want somebody to be furious at, you're lookin' at him. I'm the one with years on her. I'm the officer who sat at your table and broke faith with you. Any promise got made, I'm the one who should've known better than to make it. You put every bit of it on me."

"Thunder, don't—" Presley grabs my arm. "I'm not lettin' you take this."

I don't look away from Phantom when I say it. "Not this. Not for me."

And Phantom, who a minute ago couldn't look at either one of us, looks at me now, really looks, and the fury finds a new channel.

"You want it all on you." His voice has dropped, gone quiet and dangerous. "Fine. Let's put it on you. Let's talk about what you did."

"Harlan—"

"You marked her." The words land flat and terrible in the space between us, and beside me Presley goes rigid. "I saw it."

His jaw is working. "On her back. Your name. Property of Thunder, inked into my daughter's skin like she's a bike or a bar stool, permanent, forever, and you did it behind my back and never said a word." His voice cracks down the middle. "That's not a man sneakin' around with a girl, Thunder. A man sneakin' around, that I could understand, God help me, I was young once. But you claimed her. In ink. The most permanent thing our world's got. You put the club's own language on her body and you didn't have the decency to look me in the eye and tell me first."

And there it is, the wound under all the rest of it.

Not that I touched her.

That I claimed her like a brother claims an old lady, made it permanent and real and forever, and cut him out of the one moment a father's supposed to get.

"You're right," I tell him, because he is."About all of it. I'd have wanted to be told too."

"Don't you dare agree with me right now⁠—"

"But you're wrong about one thing." I hold his eyes. "You keep sayin' I claimed her. Like she's somethin' that got done to, somethin' with no say in it. Harlan, that woman standin' next to me walked into a tattoo shop with her chin up and told the man what she wanted and where. I tried to talk her out of the Property of. I did. I told her it was too much, too permanent, that you'd take it as a declaration of war."

I let that sit. "She got it anyway. Because she wanted it. Your daughter has more spine than the whole clubhouse put together, and you're standin' here talkin' like she's a girl I stole. She's not. She's the strongest person either of us knows, and she made a choice, and the choice was me."

Phantom's eyes cut to her.

And Presley, God love her, lifts her chin and proves every word of it.

"He's telling the truth," she says, and her voice isn't shaking anymore. "I chose it. All of it. The tattoo, the secret, him. And you want to stand here and be furious about a secret, Pops? You? You want to talk to me about keeping something from the people you love?"

"Presley." Low. A warning.

"No. You had your turn, now I'm having mine." She steps forward, and there's something coming up in her now that I've never seen. All that grief and fury she swallowed a minute ago rising back up with nowhere left to go. "Your secret was a body, Pops. Mine is that I fell in love. You want to compare? Let's compare. You buried a woman. You let my sisters grieve a mother who abandoned them for two years, when you knew the whole time she was in the ground. You let Shiver blame himself. You let Dakota lose her mind hiring investigators. And me⁠—"

Her voice breaks and climbs right through the break.

"Your secret cost me my whole family. It cost me my sisters looking at me like I killed their mother. I was a stranger who didn’t even go to supper because I was avoiding everything. I was talking to Mitch's ashes because there wasn't a living soul who'd have me. Your secret did that. And you've got the nerve to stand in this yard and be destroyed because I didn't tell you I'm happy?"

Something happens to a man when he watches the woman he loves finally put down a weight she's been hauling for far too long.

I've seen Presley strong before.

I've seen her run a whole breeding program on no sleep, how she was with her laboring sister to the hospital encouraging her, take a needle to the ribs without a sound.

But I've never seen this, never seen her stand toe to toe with the most feared man in three counties and hand him back every ounce of what he laid on her.

I have to plant my boots to keep from pulling her into my side right there, because God, she's magnificent, and she's mine, and her father is finally, finally hearing her.